The Architectural League’s 31st annual Emerging Voices Award brings a focus to creative practices that will influence the future direction of architecture. Each of the eight firms will deliver a lecture this month in Manhattan. The
Whether sites in the city or in a rural environment, DIGSAU carefully considers the projects connection with landscape and a building’s relationship between interior and exterior spaces. At the University of Delaware, DIGSAU adapted the traditional big-box form of a major bookstore, reshaping the suburban typology for an urban context serving both the university and surrounding city. Completed in 2011, the bookstore’s massing was reshaped to create an inviting pedestrian plaza. A single-story volume clad in textured brick containing the bookstore fits into a glass double-height lobby along the plaza, connecting the building to the landscape outside.
Currently, DIGSAU has returned to one of its original projects, the Dogfish Head Brewery in rural Delaware, where the firm built a new building in 2009 housing laboratory, office, and retail space. “We’re transitioning from a single building to a campus” at the rapidly expanding brewery, Dingle said. The new industrial campus plan will bridge scales on a single site, from massive warehouses to architectural follies. “With the industrial campus plan, some of the highest-level thinking has gone on at the landscape level,” Sanderson explained. “As architects, we tend to stress continuity of architecture and landscape, but we’ve found that working with landscape architects can bring up very different ideas.”
